If you were worried that popular fiction for women has too often been about finding Mr. Right, well, that time is past. It’s now just as often about finding Mr. Prosecutable DNA Sample. But what looks like a change in genre and readership betrays a deeper, older current. For women, psychological thrillers and true crime have long been here. Maybe it’s time to look at how we’ve arrived at a place where we can talk openly about our interest in stories where we are so often the victim.
Readers look to novels for many things but finding those resolutions that elude us in real life is an important one. Sometimes we go to thrillers for protection, to read stories about being a victim as a way to reverse that, in our minds even if we can’t in reality. What we call thrillers for women in 2020 have their roots in female focused dramas of the 1930s, like the play and film Gas Light—which gave us the term—and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. These were stories about women who had to figure out the truth of their situations, often completely alone, to save their sanity. As critic Kat Ellinger points out, these stories in turn were inspired by Gothic literature of the 19th century, the first genre with mostly female readers and authors, which featured heroines who aren’t believed, and who are tormented by norms, the system of marriage, and their very homes. (In a somewhat accidental tribute, those elements crept into the background of my novel Little Threats: as girls my protagonists act out scenes from Jane Eyre; and the setting over the decades is a family house that the characters are psychologically oppressed by—in this case a McMansion.)
In those classic stories the women had to rely on intuition and whispers, while in the new millennium the tech giants have given us free investigatory and surveillance tools that The Second Mrs. de Winter could only dream of. I still remember the generational unease I felt when a younger friend told me how proud she was that she no longer kept Google alerts for an ex-boyfriend. I don’t need to point out that tech has kept the most effective of those tools for themselves, though it is interesting that Amazon and Apple chose feminine names, like Alexa and Siri, for their home-embedded detectives. It’s also no wonder that by 2012’s Gone Girl, the Gothic heroine was upgraded to having Terminator-like focus and skills. By presenting a paranoid male fantasy as fact—“Can you believe my jealous wife is framing me for her murder?”—Gillian Flynn brilliantly devised a female revenge narrative that turned the gaslighting of the Scott Petersons of the world around, and cranked it into a flamethrower.
A big hit is as much about good timing as it is a good story and, looking back, Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne—problematic, vengeful, and thoroughly enjoyable—escaped the Gothic house in time for the first stirrings of #metoo.
If social media has challenged us to talk about the secrets we thought we had learned to live with, our fiction has since reflected that as well. If the mansions of Big Little Lies and the tract homes of Little Fires Everywhere seem familiar it’s that the issues faced by their occupants haven’t changed. One shock of my 40s I’m still getting used to is how many of my friends are in terrible relationships and have pledged, almost stoically, never to leave them. The reasons given are not that different from what the heroines of 19th century literature debated: the children, the house, and financial security. FFS, there’s even a plague going on.
Of course, the fictional crimes that go on inside the Gothic house are simple compared to the real crimes that occur outside of it. As Nick Cave once answered when asked to defend his blood and irony drenched album Murder Ballads, “There are a hell of a lot worse things than murder.” True Crime—a genre once held at such a remove it was kept in the deepest corner of The Strand’s basement—has become not just mainstream, but a generator effecting real change. Netflix’s How They See Us and Unbelievable drove serious discussion on racism and gender-based violence. Even Tiger King and HBO’s The Jinx could be said to examine the extremes of class and justice in America.
There had been moments of crossover before—Capote’s In Cold Blood, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line—but True Crime’s upmarket turn really happened in 2014. That’s when the podcast Serial premiered, and whole swathes of NPR listeners woke up to the reality that trials full of mistakes, misconduct, and bad evidence weren’t outliers in the justice system, they’re the norm. (That is if there’s a trial at all. Nearly all criminal cases are settled using a well oiled plea machine that stacks the deck against defendants who are Black, Latinx, or poor.)
Women think about guilt a lot when it comes to what pleasures us. (I’ll eat a remaindered hardcover of The Blondes if I ever see a list titled “10 Guilty Pleasure Reads for Men.”) This may be one of the reasons that even in our moments of escape—pretending our apartments are Gothic manses—we want to feel like our actions have meaning. Becoming absorbed in a story helps us fight our own traumas, or develop empathy for the traumas of others. Who knew that thrillers and true crime could be the key that unlocks that?
As more and more people realize that heroic lawyers, instant CSI revelations, and dramatic trials don’t exist outside of creaky network dramas, we’re left with something closer to the truth. In our fiction, and our society, we’re the detectives, and we have to solve this. It’s on us.
*
